Productivity Issues

Native metadata for all VFP's structures allows complete manual/programmatic editing of metadata which is priceless for application-wide changes that might otherwise take significantly longer to perform manually.

Excellent front-end for back-end data stores.

VFP is also extremely inter-operative with a wide variety of both legacy and modern data formats.

Many development / run paradigms (EXE's, compile on the fly FXP's, COM DLL's, EXECSCRIPT, etc...).

The Command Window is useful at design time and in suspended run time.

VFP is layer-agnostic.

It makes a great front-end for back-end databases in 2-tier designs because of its connectivity and data manipulation abilities.

It makes excellent middleware components in 3-tier designs for the same reasons.

In all cases it makes for excellent and notably un-bloated client applications, again for mostly the same reasons as above.

VFP can also be used to create monolithic applications.

Data handling capability is encapsulated

Database commands are integrated in the language.

Data handling commands are integrated in the language, which benefits applications that manipulate data. For example, the downstream quering and processing of result set cursors is an absolute snap in VFP.

Stability Issues

Typically runs fine on old boxes, with old OSes, and you typically won't ever need a cutting edge OS upgrade or service pack upgrade to run a next version, nor will a future service pack or security patch play havoc with your Fox applications.

Stable, mature, complete development environment.

Stable, mature supporting frameworks for UI, middleware, data, web.

Well established and recognized best practices.

Low rate of change.

On balance, well directed evolutionary change.

XCopy deployment: Copy your Exe and the RT-DLL into your Directory, that's all you need. (Works even with most ActiveX; nothing to register)

Developer Community Issues

Dynamic and experienced developer community, wired since the early 1990's.

See Microsoft Product Life Cycle Dates. At Tech Ed 2004, Microsoft announced a standard 10-year lifecycle horizon (5 years Mainstream and 5 years Extended) for all its business and developer products, which at this time extends VFP support from MS into the year 2014 at minimum. Prior to this VFP 8 had a support horizon of 2010.